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Article Dans Une Revue British Journal of Educational Technology Année : 2002

Email use in elementary school: An analysis of exchange patterns and content

Résumé

E-mail was embedded in a project in design & technology education in elementary school. During four lessons children worked in groups on building a flying object. These groups communicated through e-mail with groups of children from another school. The analyses of the e-mails, as viewed from distributed cognition theory, focus on the exchange patterns and content. Two characteristic exchange patterns are stacking and compounding. In stacking e-mails are sent out quickly enough to afford a ‘just-in-time' exchange of information. In compounding the e-mails transcend lessons. An ‘old' section of the e-mail reacts to the partner's e-mail about a previous lesson. A ‘new' section deals with the current lesson. Question-answer exchanges accounted for only about 15% of the communications. Connected discourse with explicit or implicit references to the partner's e-mail was likewise scarce. Groups mainly connected to each other through adoption, leading to shared scenarios of “We tell you our story – You tell us yours”. The conclusion discusses the impact of the task on the children's communication. Among others, a precise definition and teaming of the task is deemed necessary to favour embedded e-mail use. Because the genre of e-mail use in elementary school is yet to be defined the authors caution against imposing many constraints on what children write to each other.
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Dates et versions

hal-00190689 , version 1 (23-11-2007)

Identifiants

Citer

Hans van Der Meij, Kerst Boersma. Email use in elementary school: An analysis of exchange patterns and content. British Journal of Educational Technology, 2002, 33(2), pp.189-200. ⟨10.1111/1467-8535.00252⟩. ⟨hal-00190689⟩

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